‘The Democratic Party needs to be rebuilt’: Crisis mode sets in as losses pile up

Democrats are having a full-blown identity crisis.

Days after Kamala Harris’ defeat, the extent of their party’s failure is becoming increasingly clear. It’s bad enough that Democrats are still losing working-class whites, as they have in recent elections. Now, exit polls show blue-collar Latinos and some Black men, long a core part of the Democratic base, are abandoning the party, too, fueling electoral shellackings. Republicans flipped the Senate and are padding their majority. Democrats’ path to a majority in the House is narrowing. And Donald Trump won in what could only be described as a landslide in the modern era.

“The Democratic Party needs to be rebuilt,” said Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “We have become a party of elites, whether we abandoned working-class people, whether they abandoned us, whether it’s some combination of all of the above.”

In interviews with 16 elected officials, party leaders and strategists, Democrats from both wings of the party agreed they have stopped knowing how to talk to the working class, once the very core of their identity. But they were deeply divided on where to place the blame — and what to do about it. Just like Donald Trump’s victory did in 2016 — and in 2020, when he lost by a smaller margin than expected — his return to the White House is fueling a raging debate between the party’s progressive and moderate wings about where to go from here.

Sen. Bernie Sanders fired the opening shot in that clash on Wednesday, saying on X that “it should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.” Firing back, Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison called Sanders’ remarks “straight up BS,” posting that President Joe Biden is “the most-pro worker President of my life time.”

The fight over the next chair of the Democratic National Committee is one of the first arenas where the party will hash out its future under Trump 2.0. Some progressives are floating Wisconsin Democratic Party leader Ben Wikler. Jayapal said she’d “love to see somebody” who is “like a Ben Wikler.” New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy and Minnesota Democratic Party head Ken Martin are also rumored potential candidates.

But first, Democrats must survey the wreckage from Tuesday. Some moderate Democrats are blaming Harris’ erosion with non-college-educated and lower-income voters on a party they say has drifted too far to the left, arguing that its association with immigration reform, transgender rights and abortion access hamstrung them in swing areas.

Rep. Henry Cuellar, who won a hard-fought election in Texas border counties that Trump carried, said that the border was a major liability for battleground House members. There has long been an “undercurrent of tension” among Latinos in his district, Cuellar said, who are frustrated by the support the federal government has given to undocumented immigrants, in the form of food, shelter and health care.

This year, “the dam busted here where all of a sudden people said enough is enough” and voted for Trump, Cuellar said. “Some of us have been talking about border security for a long time.”

Some progressive and populist-oriented Democrats also felt a kind of vindication. They said the party should have long ago adopted a more muscular economic message. They argue that Harris trying to woo soft Republicans proved worthless. They blamed moderates for torpedoing liberal priorities like the expanded child tax credit.

The Democratic Party has faced crises before, most recently after Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016. But that year, many Democrats — and some Republicans — dismissed Trump’s victory as lacking a popular mandate. This year, his election by even wider margins made that impossible, coming after two impeachments, the riot at the Capitol and his felony convictions. The party now is less in disbelief than in a tailspin — and with an emerging consensus that its image is not just damaged, but broken.

Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), a progressive who represents the blue city of Austin some 150 miles from Cuellar’s hometown of Laredo, said Democrats need to “build a new Democratic Party brand that brings in working-class people.” But he said scapegoating immigrants for high costs is not the answer.

“Donald Trump lied and said that immigrants were to blame,” said Casar, who is running unopposed next month to chair the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “The Democratic message moving forward needs to be house prices are up not because of immigrants, but because of Wall Street, and that your health care is worsening not because of immigrants, but because of Big Pharma.”

The potency of whole issues that worked for Democrats for so long in the Trump era, like abortion rights and concerns about democracy, are now in question.

Rep. Susie Lee, a Democrat who won a tight race in a suburban district in Nevada, said that while abortion remains an important issue, there is a “hierarchy of needs” when people’s “paycheck can’t last for months and they can’t feed their kids and pay their rent.”

Democratic Rep. Chris Deluzio, who carried a battleground district in western Pennsylvania, said pocketbook concerns motivated voters across the board, and abortion rights energized the Democratic base. But other issues didn’t have a clear impact, he said.

“I’ve been talking about corporate power and its impact on how much you pay for stuff, how it hurts small businesses,” he said. “You’ve got to have a strong economic program to win.”

Other Democrats, too, argue that where Trump has tapped into the frustrations of the working class in a way that feels organic, Democrats have come across as too erudite, to the point that working-class voters feel like they’re being talked down to.

“If we talk to people like we’re trying to win a Harvard Law Moot Court competition, we could have the best ideas in the world and it doesn’t resonate,” said Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.).

Swalwell specifically pointed to the down-to-earth approach Rep. Ruben Gallego took to campaigning for the Senate in Arizona, by attending boxing fights, stock car matches and rodeos.

“Not just, like, as a campaign stunt,” he added. “He stayed and integrated himself into the rodeo culture.”

Democrats are so distraught that they are looking for answers in unusual places. In Nebraska, independent Senate candidate Dan Osborn lost, but performed better than Harris by 14 percentage points. The mechanic’s TV ads blasted “millionaires run by billionaires” and talked positively about Trump’s border wall.

Tommy McDonald, a strategist for Osborn and Democratic Sen. John Fetterman’s 2022 campaign, said one lesson is Democrats should field more candidates who are themselves workers.

“A party based on championing and identifying with the working class can run and win everywhere,” he said. “A party based on championing and identifying with subgroups cannot win everywhere, and even does worse with the subgroups they rightfully champion.”

But it’s not as though Democrats weren’t aware of these shortcomings before Trump’s victory. And nothing they tried in the run-up to Harris’ defeat worked to avert it. Jayapal said she knew Harris had a problem when she was knocking on doors for her a few weeks ago in battleground states across the Rust Belt.

Voters were complaining about immigration — and talking about the stimulus checks that Trump had delivered to them with his trademark signature.

“I said to my team and my husband, ‘I’m not sure we’re gonna win this,’” she said. “It didn’t feel like voters were convinced. They didn’t feel it, didn’t feel like they believed that Harris was significantly better than Trump.”

Now, not only did Trump win the Electoral College, like he did in 2016 — but he appears poised to win the popular vote too once all ballots are counted.

“With Hillary’s defeat, we said, the majority of us voted against that, and we felt like we could resist,” said Donna Brazile, former Democratic National Committee chair. This year, “the American people rejected normalcy, decency, morality and they chose Trump.”

She said, “Let’s sit with that.”